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cagraham writes "The WSJ, combing through Amazon's Q3 earnings report, found that the company is currently using 1,400 robots across three of their fulfillment centers. The machines are made by Kiva Systems (a company acquired by Amazon last year), and help to warehouses more efficient by bringing the product shelves to the workers. The workers then select the right item from the shelf, box it, and place it on the conveyor line, while another shelf is brought. The management software that runs the robots can speed or slow down item pacing, reroute valuable orders to more experienced workers, and redistribute workloads to prevent backlogs."

[Explanation: every new technology destroys jobs in one field, while creating even more jobs in other fields, for a net gain of jobs. Far more people have jobs today than had jobs 200 years ago -- and it's not a case of "if you have lots of babies, the jobs for them will magically appear;" it's a case of the additional jobs having been made possible by new tech.

To pessimistically focus on the lost jobs, while ignoring the created jobs which are great

Even earlier, IEEE Spectrum had an article about KIVA as early as 2007 [ieee.org], and a more in-depth one [ieee.org] following in 2008. Amazon bought KIVA last year (even Slashdot noticed [slashdot.org]) for obvious reasons -- workers get a new item to pack into a box about every 6 seconds. The whole AGV system is highly efficient, significantly speeding up the warehouse processes.

I'm quite surprised Slashdot didn't pick it up back then -- but then again, I suppose I could've posted it when I first read about it:)

From the summary..., I figured it was a bunch of ASIMO robots programmed to trundle around the warehouses screaming in the voice of Sgt. R. Lee Ermey's voice "MOVE IT! Move it, MAGGOTS! Work FASTER!"...

Not really surprising: Workers who talk to each other might start making friends, and eventually realize how much management is screwing them over, and then go on to form a union and force management to improve pay or benefits or working conditions. A basic rule when trying to oppress people is that you do everything in your power to keep the oppressed from organizing, and cutting off communication between them is a standard way of doing that.

And this kind of rule is standard operating procedure in sweatshops around the world for exactly the same reason.

Replace Amazon with Modern, and you'll cover more ground while being just as accurate. Actually, on reflection, there's no need to modify the subject - Workers... is historically accurate for most of organized human civilization.

Replace Amazon with Modern, and you'll cover more ground while being just as accurate. Actually, on reflection, there's no need to modify the subject - Workers... is historically accurate for most of organized human civilization.

Yup - that's why companies these days are so process-oriented, and why IT managers tend to be project-oriented. They want to avoid making it about the people, which minimizes the value of any particular employee and therefore their bargaining power.

I think companies sell themselves short as a result, and not only their employees.

I remember sitting in a meeting many years ago where we were talking about how to estimate the cost of IT projects. It was a large-group brainstorming session, and I naively raise

That article is infected with an over-the-top victim mentality right from its very title. If Mac were truly a "slave," he would still be in that job; slaves are not free to quit their jobs. Everyone who accepts a job in a warehouse does so because it's the best job offer they received. Slaves, on the other hand, continue to be slaves because the alternative is to be hunted down as a runaway slave.

As much as I love my dad and his cool job of truck driving, the self driving car might impact that line of work. Self driving semis won't be quick to hit the road until after the civilian vehicles are out. I think the public will have a bit of fear for the big ol' trucks running under the control of T2000. And to more practical ends, the way you drive a semi is different than a regular car, so the software will need to be more advanced. In the short run(5-10 years after release of self driving cars) though delivery vans will be used quite effectively.

I think if the self driving car becomes popular, there will be a certain size van that will become popular. It will be big enough to hold cargo, but small enough to be able to handle with the self driving car software. While it would not be as cost efficient for larger cargo loads, it would be cheaper for loads in its size because not having to pay for a driver is big time. I think grocery stores, Walmart, and even local distributors could use these. The nice thing about this is that any time logistics sees a boon like this, the prices consumers pay goes down even more. Lower prices for food lets people save more money to invest in other things or donate and society's advancement accelerates. So we should look forward to the self driving car.

To a certain degree, it is sad for someone to lose their job to a robot. But it is just as sad to lose your job to out sourcing of cheaper labor. The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself. The Internet gives you the ability to keep progressing in education past what you received in secondary education. And if you're a kid who hasn't graduated high school, I envy you because I wanted to take college level courses when I was in high school. Back in the early 90s, you just didn't have a way to educate yourself past what your teachers fed you outside of teaching yourself coding or something at home with limited materials. I mean you could sit down and just read through the encyclopedias as I'm sure many Slashdotters have done. But today, with the Internet, you can get a solid education if you're an active learner. If you need to be spoon fed, the Internet isn't quite there, but it is getting there.

I'm just saying there is no excuse to not be learning as your chief pass time now. You might think learning about other disciplines won't help you in your workplace. But you never know what can click in your head as a business idea when you study cross discipline. Also if you deliberately make it one of your hobbies to learn new stuff on the Internet, you might eventually have enough knowledge to be a tradesman in other fields.

Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed. And what you can do with your mind will have a bigger impact than what people with a great mind could do back in the day.

Self driving semis won't be quick to hit the road until after the civilian vehicles are out.... the way you drive a semi is different than a regular car, so the software will need to be more advanced

Citation, please. The gearing is different, the stopping distance is different, the length of the vehicle (think lane changes) is different, the turning radius is different... but these are all *variables*, not fundamental changes to the software. The biggest difference I can think of is that trucks would need additional waypoints programmed in so they'll stop at weigh stations.

On the other hand, truck drivers represent a significant cost in both money *and time*. If a truck driver costs a company $50k/y

Big truck companies like Volvo are already putting the radar and computer vision systems from their high-end cars into trucks. The trucks cost more anyway, meaning it's a smaller proportion of the price tag, the truck operator doesn't have as much confidence in human drivers as the amateur car owner (because they get to see the real statistics of how many accidents take a truck off the road and require an insurance claim every year) and the truck cab is a big place with a lot of room for gadgets like this.

Today a brand new top-of-the-line Volvo truck, of the sort you'd buy for a long distance haulage company that cares about its drivers - will auto-stop from highway speeds when it detects an obstacle and the driver doesn't react to a warning sound. If the driver does react (because they were merely distracted and not asleep) it has everything set up to help them complete an emergency manoeuvre, e.g. sharp lane change without toppling or jack-knifing, crash braking.

Another thing long distance hauliers might be interested in is systems in which amateur drivers on a highway become "ducklings", forming an automatic convoy behind a large truck with a professional driver without any further intervention by their drivers. The truck advertises "I'm willing to be mother duck" and anybody with a compatible car can turn the system on and know they'll arrive safely at their chosen exit. That's been demo'd on public highways but isn't yet an option you can buy in the showroom. If they can get the legalities sorted out this could be a bonus for everyone - no-one likes long straight highway journeys but at least the guy at the front is getting paid to take proper rest breaks.

What's cool about truck driving? There's nothing cool about doing a job that a train could do better (if we'd supported trains instead of cars, for the benefit of The People instead of the automakers, we'd have much more rail) let alone one which a robot could do better.

Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed.

What would we do with a million unemployed truck drivers? I don't know if you actually know any truck drivers, but I do... and there aren't a lot of them who are PhD material if you catch my drift. "Learn more and get a better education and a better job" isn't an option.

Let me also point out that if there were better jobs that truck drivers *could* be doing, they'd be doing them already and we'd have a shortage of truck drivers. But we don't have a shortage of truck drivers.

The point isn't to make truck drivers unemployed, it is to tell the next generation,"You won't find job security in truck driving in your generation." Truck drivers will likely still be needed for 15+ years from now even if everything rolls out perfect for the self driving car.

I've actually seen automated driving systems for trucks, and they work beautifully.I suspect once acceptance happen, truck drivers will strike and cause chaos, then they will get a check for the rest of their lives even if they aren't working. Much like what happened to the men that loaded boats before the container had been invented.Still have million+ displaced buy a system that needs, at most, 1000 people to develop and roll out an

" will have a bit of fear for the big ol' trucks running under the control of T2000"no they won't.They should be afraid of the majority people operating them now.

"The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself.towards...what? a million fewer jobs is a million fewer jobs. t's not like other avenues will open up becasue the tradition types of avenues that would open up are not down through automation.

By moving the shelves they are able to create a queue of work for the picker, such that there is little downtime between picks. If the picker was moved, they would basically be idle while moving from shelf to shelf.

I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.

They could but that would make the process into a serial process. Why waste the time bringing the picker back and forth from the shelves to the belt? If you have enough or fast enough robots, it is more efficient to have them timed so that another shelf arrives just in time for the previous shelf to be removed.

Yes... bring the shelf forward, worker picks the item off the shelf, turns around and puts it in the box and does whatever needs to be done. In the meantime, the robot has brought the shelf for the next item.

Also, I would think motion sickness or something would come into play with a robotic platform moving a worker back and forth all the time.

According to some online book weight calculator I randomly tried, a 500 page, common-sized book may weigh 700 grams. So the shelf could hold 170 books before approaching the weight of a 120 kg operator. That's a lot of books for one shelf. In all likelihood the shelves hold fewer than 170 books.

- The Biggie(tm): the time the human spends traveling in racks is wasted time that's paid by the hour. Robots aren't paid by the hour, so even if the robots are half the speed of a human, you can simply deploy five times as many robots, and now you aren't paying people for travel time between pick faces AND you're moving more product with fewer man-hours.
- Racks don't need to be human-length, allowing more storage in less space.
- Product is lighter than a person, so moving it consumes less fuel. Fuel costs are a very serious expense in a warehouse.
- Robots can zip around gathering well-organized product faster than a human can think of where to move next. And even if the robot knows exactly where to take the human, it wouldn't be able to accelerate very fast without additional harnesses/restraints for the human.
- Easier to segregate high-value product. If the robots are bringing you just the SKU you need then nobody except the facility manager has a reason to be wandering around the iPad locker, which means fewer iPads growing legs. Missing product will be noticed very quickly if there's any kind of auditing.
- Lower inventory error rate, because a robot will never accidentally pick from the wrong location. Your cycle counts and physical inventories are suddenly looking much cleaner, especially on high-volume products.

With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS. Where do you think those up-to-40% savings are coming from? Yes, storage space, fuel, rent/property taxes, and shrinkage (depending on your security) are all major expenses, but by far the biggest cost in any warehouse operation is labor. The travel time between locations is time that's no longer going into the pockets of workers.

With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS.

Nah it's probably true and yet completely misleading. Amazon has increased its headcount 400% over 5 years, so it's probably true that they'll keep all the staff they currently have but cut down on seasonal hiring and not need to hire more people as they continue to grow. Ultimately it's neither a problem or their fault. Human advancement is built upon finding ways to decrease work and the reason Amazon is doing this is because we choose to buy from the cheapest company not the one employing the most people etc.

But that puts our priorities upside down. The right thing to do is give those people what they need, not insist that Amazon find a less efficient way to do business so that it's forced to employ them in shitty jobs. Economically these options work out the same, the same stuff gets done either way, so why prefer the option that leaves somebody doing pointless extra work? Because you hate them for being poor?

There is a (almost certainly apocryphal) story about an American economist who goes to an underdeveloped nation to try to help them improve their economy. The government guide shows him some civil engineering project out in a rural area (building a road or a bridge or a dam or something) with at least a hundred workers digging all over the place with shovels. The economist sees that there is a bulldozer sitting idle nearby, and assumes that it is broken and they don't have the technical skills to get it running. He tells the guide that they need to work with a technical school somewhere to get a steady supply of trained mechanics so that they don't waste resources like that. The guide assures him that the bulldozer works, but there is so much unemployment in the area that they can't afford to put all of these people out of work by using the bulldozer. So the economist recommends (facetiously) hiring hundreds more from the countryside, taking away their shovels, and giving them all spoons to dig with.

Getting things done and providing a safety net are two different (orthogonal, not opposing) things.

Right after I'm finished telling it to the families of the post carriage drivers who lost jobs when the telegram took off, the lamp lighters who lost jobs when electric street lights were invented, and the stable hands who got laid off when the auto-mobile replaced the horse for most transportation.

It used to take the vast majority of the time and efforts of society just to find and collect enough food not to starve. It's incredibly naive and short sighted to think that the concept of farming that decreased the work in foraging and hunting vastly was somehow a retrograde step or fundamentally different from automating picking stuff up and putting it in boxes. The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.

One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.

The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.

That's the interesting point -- will we ever reach a threshold where we say, "great! another boring job has been replaced! that's one less person that needs to work." Or will that sense never change so long as profit is based off the ownership of the company?

The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.

Not even that - the problem is that the economy is built around the idea that everyone has to work, and most people have to have a full time job. Mechanisation has long been done on the premise that it improves our lives by reducing the amount of time we spend working and therefore increasing the amount of time to do leisure activities - but that's at odds with the economy. If we're ever going to achieve that goal of decreased work time and increased leisure time then there will at some point have to be a

Nixon tried to pass a negative income rate. I like the idea. The Earned Income Work Credit comes close.

As to your specifics, I would nix them. It is a one size fits all solution and ignores what is actually happening on the ground. There will be unforeseen consequences as firms try to dodge the rules. I personally would advocate union reform. Germany seems to be able to do the union thing much better then the US.

I'd certainly suggest the improved labour laws you list if not simply because I don't see why we wouldn't want everyone to have such basics. There was an article on conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the UK recently and although it was hardly inspiring it certainly made me glad for the laws we have in place:
> The right to parental leave (no firing because your wife had a kid and you need to be somewhere else).
> Expecting employees to pick items from above shoulder height or the ground being clear

I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.

I'll reply here and not to the AC on principle.

I'll agree with his point that many similar laws are on the books in the US. The problem in the US is that these rules are not well-enforced.

In the US it is illegal to not pay people for time worked. In practice I know LOTS of people who were asked to record only their scheduled hours and not their actual hours worked, but they were expected to complete their duties before leaving regardless of schedule. That is, they wanted to compensate them like hourly wo

The Shires (not shire;) ). I certainly can't comment for every company in the UK and clearly there are some severe examples of abuse going on. I've worked for 3 medium to large businesses in the manufacturing sector and when it comes to safe working it is virtually always the business trying to force people to follow policies they don't want to (and not because of performance measures that aren't related to it). I've been involved in two business units trying to get dust masks used and I kid you not that i

We already effectively have some sort of that, it's just spread around three things: minimum wage laws, tax credits, and unemployment welfare. The end result is very convoluted and inconsistent, and we'd do much better setting the goal explicitly, and writing one simple law to achieve that.

I'm actually in favor of universal basic income guarantee. A fixed amount for everyone, set yearly to match the minimum living expenses (the bar for which would be defined by legislatures, preferably local to reflect diff

You're correct, of course, but but more importantly: every new technology destroys jobs in one field, while creating even more jobs in other fields, for a net gain of jobs. Far more people have jobs today than had jobs 200 years ago -- and it's not a case of "if you have lots of babies, the jobs for them will magically appear;" it's a case of the additional jobs having been made possible by new tech.

To pessimistically focus on the lost jobs, while ignoring the created jobs which are greater in quantity a

I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.

Because people are more expensive than robots. So you want to use multiple robots in parallel to make the people more efficient. If you move the picker to the product, you maybe able to slightly speed up a serial process, but if you have a parallel flow of many products to a single picker, then the picker can focus only on the tasks that cannot yet be automated.

I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.

During testing they found a serious bug with that.

The robot ferries would repeatedly demoralise workers with statements like "hurry up meatbag", "why are humans so slow" and "Ugh, why must I vocalise, cant you insipid fluid sacks learn binary". However this was deemed acceptible by the testing coordinator, the clincher was when they started pushing the human workers in the backs with rifle buts and threatening to liquefy their children to spread on their toast.

I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.

I saw a similar system in operation in a UK fulfillment centre (for another company) around 6 years ago. The advantage was that one picker could pick from around 14,000 low volume items from one location.

Most of the editors were around before Dice. You need to give them a break -- these guys aren't English majors, they're technologists. Save your annoyance for typos and stupidities in a large newspaper, where they have editors with degrees in English and literature rather than engineering and programming and math.

Although it would be nice if Dice actually did hire two or three English majors to proofread what the editors and firehose have selected for display.

To be fair this isn't actually a new concept. One of the American founding fathers (I think, give me a break I'm not American or 250 years old) said something like: I must be a general so that my sons can be doctors and lawyers and their sons can be sculptors and artists.

There are people who are incredibly deprived in the world. Wouldn't helping them if we have the spare time and resources help uplift all our spirits? Wouldn't the pursuit of fundamental truths be the scientific or philosophical be a wort

Maybe. I know a lot of creative people who would never just sit and watch TV, that's an anecdote to counter yours. Perhaps there are enough people who love to create, and these would be given incentives. The wage for simple tasks like cleaning would go up, as the supply of workers went down. Many would consider this to be fair. For a while people could do menial ta

Just to add, look at all the junk brought to us by capitalism that we don't need. Junk mail, ads, toy fads for kids, etc. In the software industry we're adding layer on layer, buidling more complex systems, for what? It's like the developers are running around hamster wheels, just trying to make themselves something more to do. There is a great deal of improvement, granted, but there's also a huge flow of useless junk. If people had more freedom to choose what to do, instead of frantically chasing paychecks

The problem is that technology was supposed to free people up to not have to work.... except that the profits from such advances don't trickle down to the people, but instead stay within the company and enter the dark shady environment of financial investments, locking up the productivity and wealth distribution.

One problem is that there is no smooth transition from "here" to "there." More and more people are losing their service jobs. Manufacturing jobs, outside of restaurants, are gone already. Fast food restaurants will soon switch to robots to make sandwiches, and every customer will be happy about that. A sandwich place will be open 24/7, will be assembling sandwiches repeatably and accurately, with ingredients that you can infinitely specify, with prices that track what exactly, and how much, you consume, and with guarantee that your sandwich was never touched by dirty hands.

Another problem is that you cannot "free people up to not have to work." Humans cannot sit idly. They go crazy. Just see what's happening in ghettos, where inhabitants have too much free time and too little to do. Futurists assured us that in the future people will be working one hour per week, and the rest will be spent on art, books, travel, and other creative and pleasing activities. But nothing of the sort is happening in ghettos. People there could spend years learning the arts. Unfortunately, the only art they are interested in is the "knock-out game" violence. They don't read; they don't even speak the same language as the rest of the country does. In essence, they self-segregate. Perhaps a sociologist could say that this is a natural development, formation of tribes. But this is not a welcome development.

You could see this process in works of Vassily Golovachev (don't know if any are translated.) He started a couple decades ago with a vision of a bright future, Star Trek style, where people cooperate and achieve great heights together. But around the edge of the century he developed lots of pessimism in his futuristic vision. It became so bad that the dividing line is even visible within one trilogy (The Black Man.) What would people do, young and old, if they know that they do not matter, they are not needed, and nothing that they do has any importance? The escape into arts and culture is not for everyone. The younger people would band up together to disprove that theory - usually by forming gangs and assaulting other people for fun, just to show them who is the boss. The older people will gain control over the planet. None of that would be done to gain material wealth. It will be done only to enjoy strength and power over others, since this is not only the most powerful motive of all human activity, but also the one that no robot and no automated factory can deliver. (Unless, of course, that factory makes robot soldiers.) The social competition will continue, just on another game board, and with another figures. But the end result is always the same: domination over others. Not everyone is afflicted with this malady, but enough are.

You're using ghettos as your basis for concluding that idleness leads to violence and chaos? Last I checked, ghettos tended to be full of people living in poverty and despair, hence why they live in ghettos. I'm not sure the utopian ideal of people producing art and things for the betterment of society in their idle time is based on the assumption that the people with plenty of time also happen to have no possessions, are living day to day and trying hard not to die of starvation/exposure/disease.

You're using ghettos as your basis for concluding that idleness leads to violence and chaos? Last I checked, ghettos tended to be full of people living in poverty and despair, hence why they live in ghettos

Aslo, if you use people on welfare to draw conclusions, you're already selecting for people with poor work ethic, as it's currently not considered socially acceptable to be on welfare

There are smooth ways to transition, they aren't politically viable because this is 'Merca and we aints wantin' non of that their liberal socialism here, we want a profit driven society just like jeezus intended. hee. haw.

You may want to publish some of those ways, or to link to them at least. Otherwise how can anyone discuss your assertion?

The plan should account for the following problems, among other:

* Who will invest money into a fully automated factory? What will be ROI of that factory?

* Some outside labor has to be paid for, such as iron ore that has to be mined by humans, by hand (for example.) Those humans will want to be paid. Normally this becomes a part of the product's cost. How will the product be able to

Some people, when fortunate enough to gain a lot of leisure time, do spend that time on self-education, art, or other constructive pursuits. Others spend it on destructive pursuits. What's needed is a way to inculcate an ethos of desiring the constructive pursuits and reviling the destructive pursuits.

But don't blame technology. By all realistic accounts, life before technology was even more brutish than it is now.

I suppose if you show a propensity to misuse your leisure time, you should get less of it.

What's needed is a way to inculcate an ethos of desiring the constructive pursuits and reviling the destructive pursuits.

This reminds me of hopeless, failed attempts of USSR to inculcate an ethos of "the new man who would be fit for the new Communist society." This is not possible. Humans are not driven by collective benefit, as ants are. Humans are driven by personal benefit. Many attempts were made in USSR to change this, and all of them have failed. Why should this one succeed? There is no reason. Hum

I'd trust a sufficiently automated system to manage correct mayonnaise handling procedures over a couple of bored teenagers. The machines are much, much, more likely to have washed the pans, kept the mayo at the right temperature, and rotated stock when they were supposed to.

technology was supposed to free people up to not have to work.... except that the profits from such advances don't trickle down to the people, but instead stay within the company

You are so right! Nobody owns cars, or televisions, or lives in centrally-heated residences. Computers have not become more affordable for people. Nobody has running water, or access to antibiotics. The internet has not trickled down to anyone. Modern transportation systems have not been built out to any extent. If only the profits from technology would trickle down, just a little bit, we might be able to advance from sending letters written on papyrus to some more rapid means of communication. In the

So what happens when 80% are unemployed, 10% employed, and 10% hold all the wealth. It won't be pretty whatever it is going to be.

What will happen is that the unemployed 80% will vote to disband the arrangement, such that the wealth is collectively held. They probably won't call the result "communism" because of the stigma associated with that label, but that's pretty much what it'll actually be.

The alternative is that they will have their right to vote taken away from them, in which case they'll be voting with bullets instead of ballots. Either way, the system where the minority control all of the wealth without sharing any of it wit

Any "control" a person may have beyond personally wielding a weapon is an abstract notion - it hinges on someone else who actually controls it following orders, which is part of the social arrangement. When the latter breaks down, the military is its own thing, and it's not clear why it would decide to support the wealthy in such a scenario, unless it's recruited from the same class, and shares the privileges.

But even then, at some point, there are enough discontent people to sweep those in power away regar

Now every worker can be fully stressed out doing routine work. As you become better at your task, your task gets faster. You'll never be on top of it.

It's worse than it apears in the summary: The Video also shows that the system highlights the item on the shelf with a laser, and a light tells the picker in which box this item goes.
The pickers now really has a robot job: See the laser beam, take the item, see the light, put in the box below.
He does not even need to read the order.